This holiday season, with two sisters, our mother, the husbands, eight children, our cousin Peter visiting from Los Angeles and two dogs, the energy should be bottled.
Every year I forget what it’s like to have the kids home from school, when the weather makes getting outside with teams of kids far more challenging and my nerves get shot because my time is not my own. It’s an adjustment I’m not licensed to handle, but this year my sister Melanie is staying with me, and our love fest is brewing, noses and foreheads touching at any given moment, silliness abounding, claws retracted.
“Sisters are a beautiful thing, until it turns ugly,” somebody said to me the other day when I told him I’d be with my two sisters and all our children over the holidays. He was right about that, but in the past few years my sisters and I have worked hard at listening to one another without letting our sensitivities overrule our practicality, and it works, most of the time.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. At any moment a comment hits a nerve and emotions run the gamut, but there’s always somebody who tosses in the humor and tempers the boil.
As we walk through bustling Aspen together, we feel an electrical current pulsing all around us. Everything outside the current passes by like a dream.
When I ask the children what their favorite part of the holidays has been, they all agree it’s being together every day and every night. It’s the same for me: companionship with the people I love most, day in and day out. And when nerves get challenged, I pop a bottle, because there’s always someone who agrees the time is now, regardless of what the clock says.
With Melanie staying with me, she helps me laugh at the insanity of it all. We bustle around the house together, she making the beds and folding laundry while I cook and make futile attempts at writing, the interruptions too unbearable. When Wade gets home from work, she opens my office door and they both chuckle at my roar for having my creativity interrupted. If I were an artist in a studio painting I feel I would be left alone more, but writing doesn't invite that kind of attention.
The laughter is deep, real and much needed as tempers explode when a game goes wrong and Tucker, with his vivid imagination, has another meltdown, screaming, “I’m going to put you on a big platter and feed you to a monster, and he’s going to eat you, and you’ll be all alone in his stomach with no family!”
And that’s what I’m talking about. It’s not about being eaten by the monster; it’s about what happens when you’re all alone inside that dark cavern, without your family.
